- Last day is Tuesday June 5th (11:59:59pm Pacific Daylight Time), 2012.

- High score wins.

- No savestates, savestate practices, etc. during the round.

- MAME INP recordings are encouraged but optional.

- A screenshot is required to enter a score (press F12 to save screenshot showing your final score) or take a photo of the game screen.

- If you're a MARP competitor on this title, keep in mind this is just a friendly competition among forum members, so maybe you shouldn't enter. However, if you're a forum member and this is a game you're good at and nobody knows about it, this is your time to shine!

- Even if you don't have a competitive score or if you don't *think* that you have a competitive score, please post it anyway to keep the thread fun & to give everybody a good sense of score ranges.

- Please make sure your scores are from games that take place during the competition period (no posting your best score from last year, etc.).

- Use of autofire or other non-standard hacks within MAME or your PC's OS are not allowed. No program or other person or entity of any sort may manipulate your controls during your game. Coaching & back-seat driving is fine as long as the party doesn't directly influence the game or controls.

Let me start by saying I don't think I'm very good at this game. During my childhood I played this at my local K-mart that had an arcade in it. Being in a K-Mart, I think we got 8 tokens for a dollar which was a pretty good deal. Needless to say I didn't mind going shopping with my parents unless it was Friday (Dukes of Hazzard was on).

Nephasth

Managed to sneak in a few rounds this morning. Not my personal best, but thought I'd start things off with this score. I can see myself playing Gorf more during these next two weeks than the entire year and half I've owned the machine.

A few gameplay techniques I use:

Astro Battles - Shoot the Gorf robot that is laying down the enemies in formation.

Laser Attack - Take out the laser shooting enemies early on.

Galaxians - The blue enemies fire a delayed third shot that can catch you off gaurd, so watch out for those.

Space Warp - Stay alive (obvious), to me this is the hardest level.

Flag Ship - You can shoot the pieces you break off of the flag ship for an extra 150 points each.

Don't run into point values displayed on the screen. They will kill you.

I just tried Gorf out on the Beast... The speed is pretty much dead on compared to my dedicated game. I'm using version .135.

I will say though, Gorf ---smurfing--- sucks on MAME! The enemies have different behaviours on some stages. Like when they come down at you and end up back at the top of the screen... in MAME they just come right back at you, on the real deal they reset in formation first before coming back at you. On Galaxians, a yellow enemy breaks formation to come at you before the whole formation is done being set up in MAME, on the real deal no enemies come at you until the whole formation is set up... and the graphics are horrendous!

I struggled for quite some time to get past 15k. I was able to get past it only once. As far as speed goes, it wasn't till I got to round 13 that I noticed any slowness. More enemy ships are coming at you and shooting more bombs (just too many objects for it to keep track of).

On a side note, I think the flag ship and the Death Star must be made by the same corporation. One or two hits directly in front of the fuel tank and kaboom! By the way, I love the explosions of the flag ship!

Had a great run going. No deaths through the second flag ship...then died twice on level 11. And then once on laser attack. Ugh.

I think my worst stage is Galaxians. The barrage of bullets traps me. I have found that the best way to tackle that level is to charge the ships that fly down screen. Fly towards them shooting rather than try to dodge all the bullets.

Nephasth

Round 20 for that score. My personal best (not during this comp) with 3 ships is 33000 and some change. I've been trying to get better scores by hitting the ships that fly across the top in the first round and hitting pieces of the flagship as they fall during this comp. My best was accomplished by just trying to avoid being hit, I may go back to that technique.

115u2 runs awful slow133 runs fine, but I never did get bezels/layout artwork to work with d3d video mode & 133, but this game runs fast enough with ddraw video mode & artwork, so I'm game.Oy, I had to reprogram my front end batch file. Gorf not only taunts me during during the game but also when I'm setting up to play it properly!

hiscore patch on 133 doesn't save high scores =(

I think I got about 16k after a couple of games, but I can probably repeat or better that. Don't count that score for the competition.

Thinking back on this game now, this is very strange: take Midway's licensed Space Invaders by Taito & tweak it & rename it, take Midway's licensed Galaxian by Namco & tweak it, make 3 more simple games, throw it in a cool cabinet & make it talk, & you've got a new game. I can't see that working today--back then, with copyrights & with the fledgling video game industry, it was probably easier to get away with appropriation. I wonder what the licensing agreement was like (if there even was one) to be able to take 2 manufacturer's games/graphics/etc & combine them into another game. I read that the Galaxians stage was removed from all home console ports.

The 2nd & 3rd time around, Galaxians provides a bit of a bullet hell environment--I like it!

Any tips for squeezing more points out of the game? There are certainly ways to get a few more points (shoot upper ships in Astro Battles, shoot Galaxians only when they're attacking, etc. You seem to get 20 points for knocking off each piece of the flagship. That will take a while to add up, but you can get several hundred that way. As a kid, I remember being amused that you can shoot off part of the ship's wing but the disconnected end of the wing stays with the ship instead of falling off. :]

Tip: On the first level, don't move the joystick, take a single shot. When the red Gorf reaches the left side of the screen take another shot and you should get the 250 bonus. I was able to reproduce on level 6 but not on 11 yet.

Thinking back on this game now, this is very strange: take Midway's licensed Space Invaders by Taito & tweak it & rename it, take Midway's licensed Galaxian by Namco & tweak it, make 3 more simple games, throw it in a cool cabinet & make it talk, & you've got a new game. I can't see that working today--back then, with copyrights & with the fledgling video game industry, it was probably easier to get away with appropriation. I wonder what the licensing agreement was like (if there even was one) to be able to take 2 manufacturer's games/graphics/etc & combine them into another game. I read that the Galaxians stage was removed from all home console ports.

I bet the licensing of Space Invaders gave them some leeway in that. The whole thing reeked to me of 'cheap'. The only sort of draw was the voice synthesis. But I play it on occasion, now.

I remember a guy back then shooting the mother ship on his first shot. I've have done it once or twice in MAME, but that was many years ago.